Every Song Has a 'You'
by mildlyattractivegroove
Summary: It's not that I still thought about her all that much, but when I did manage to conjure up the memory of Quinn Fabray from time to time, it was just all so damned immediate.
1. Chapter 1

"Ms. Berry?"

The minute I heard Sam's voice on the line, I knew what he had to be calling about.

"Did you find her?" I asked, my voice thick with prescription-induced sleep.

"Why don't you just come down to the bar and we can talk? I can send a cab over to your-"

"I can walk; it's not that far," I reassured him. I knew he was trying to be kind, but the truth was, I needed to walk off the medication to get my head straight for whatever was about to happen, wanted to walk on the off chance that-

If he had spotted her somewhere, maybe I'd catch a glimpse of her, too.

It's not that I still thought about her all that much, but when I did manage to conjure up the memory of Quinn Fabray from time to time, it was just all so damned immediate. Her raspy laugh would suddenly be tickling my ear as if she were right there next to me again.

It was infuriating.

Sam Evans owned a little blink-and-you'd-miss-it bar around the corner from the apartment where I was living back when I knew Quinn. The place was a hole—cheap, dark, and seedy—but it suited our purposes at the time, and he'd always been discreet, for which I was grateful in the years that followed.

I was halfway there that night he called me out of the blue when I realized that he might actually have her there in the bar with him. _Quinn_. Just sitting there, perhaps in that old threadbare booth seat in the corner, sipping on a glass of scotch with that half-lidded look in her eyes like nothing had ever happened. And there I was in a pair of jeans that were starting to sag at the hips and a ratty old Columbia sweatshirt.

I panicked, briefly, and almost turned back, until I remembered that her giving a damn about what I wore was one of those things I had invented about her.

I smiled then, shrugging. Quinn Fabray was a nothing if not a compilation of all the things other people invented about her, the things she invented about herself. Even her name was an invention, or so I'd been told.

I'd been a fool all those years ago, thinking I knew her, thinking I could save her, when really she was saving me, steeling my stomach against the cruelty to come.

The place was empty when I arrived, save for Sam, who was sitting behind the bar, disinterestedly thumbing through the newspaper. For a moment, I stood in the doorway, rubbing my hand across my forehead and eyeing that back booth like it was one of those Magic Eye puzzles, as if she would appear there if only I could focus on it just right.

There clink of glass-on-glass caused me to flinch, and I looked over to find Sam pouring two shots of whiskey.

"You're going to want that," he said, pushing one of the shot glasses toward my end of the bar.

"Is she dead?" I felt guilty for asking it, and even worse for sort of wanting it to be true. Sometimes, things were just easier to stomach if I thought of her as not existing after our little interlude ended.

"God, no!" he said, jumping up from his stool and guiding me over to a seat. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you think-"

"It's alright, Sam," I said. "Just tell me, whatever it is, please."

He went and got his phone from the bar, pulled something up on it, and passed it to me with a sigh.

There on the screen was a picture of a group of teenaged girls on what appeared to be a bench in Central Park. He'd obviously taken the photo from a distance away, and at first, I didn't understand the point.

"The girl on the end," Sam said then, sensing my confusion, "on the right. Could that be...?"

The girl on the far end of the photograph was neither blonde, nor delicate, but there was a certain smirk on her lips, a quirk in her eyebrow that was uniquely, distinctly Quinn.

"Beth?" I asked, pulling the phone closer to my face as if that would somehow help to solve the mystery.

"I don't know," he said. "That's why I called you. I've seen her in the park a few times now, whenever I go for a run, and something about that face...,"

Hearing his voice trail off like that, I looked up at him and saw that swoony look people seemed to get whenever they talked about Quinn.

"I didn't know you still thought of her," I admitted. I had long since gotten over the romantic notion that I had been the only one in our little circle with cause to remember Quinn fondly, but I had never suspected Sam.

He shook his head, though. "I never...I mean, she didn't...sometimes you just can't help but care about someone, even though you don't really know them."

I snorted at that, smiling at him knowingly.

"I guess I just figured if anyone would know, it would be you," he continued. My heart swelled at the idea that Sam thought that I, in particular, would be privy to any sort of special knowledge about Quinn.

She had told me, of course, that she'd had a baby when she was fifteen. But I hadn't really thought about what that actually meant until now, now that I was looking at this practically grown person who so clearly had to be a genetic mixture of Quinn and—

There she was, laughing in my ear again,

"What's so funny?" I'd asked her.

We were standing in front of my bathroom mirror. I was brushing my teeth and she was behind me with her arms wrapped around my waist. It was one of those rare times when she'd actually agreed to stay the whole night, and the sheer domesticity of seeing her in her pajamas had me feeling giddy and excited.

"It just occurred to me that she probably looks a lot like you, probably more like you than like me," Quinn said casually, before dipping her head down to sink her teeth into the top of my shoulder.

"Who?" I asked pulling away with a closed-mouth smile so I could rinse.

"My little girl," she mused, sliding away into the bedroom.

My stomach lurched. I knew what this meant. The last time she'd brought up her daughter, she'd cut me off and disappeared for two weeks. I padded into the bedroom and slipped in between the sheets next to her, dejected. She was gone before I woke up in the morning.

I had no way of knowing, then, that that would be one of the last times I'd ever see her.

"I think I will take that drink, Sam," I said quietly, handing him back his phone. He nodded, and in short order, he came back with a gin and tonic. I smiled, gratefully.

"If that really is her daughter, do you think she's...?" he asked.

I shook my head. For the last year or so I'd hoped more than suspected that Quinn had stuck around, kept a hand in, for my sake. But if that was really her daughter in the photograph, I knew she had to be long gone. Because of all the demons that chased Quinn Fabray, all the visions that haunted her dreams, I knew this was the one of which she was most afraid.

I had a second drink there in the bar with Sam, and we talked a little about the old days. Not just about Quinn, but about all the people that used to stop by the bar back then, people I'd forgotten about, or at least tried to forget.

Just as the sun was starting to come up, Sam put me in a cab and sent me home. I sank back into bed without even taking my jeans off, and didn't open my eyes again until late that afternoon.


	2. Chapter 2

Because she _was_ my New York for those first few years, I sometimes find myself describing Quinn in the same way I'd describe the city itself: elegant, mysterious, exciting, doomed...

Except now I know that _we_ were the ones who were doomed. All of the rest of us, running around trying to _make something_ of our sad little lives. Meanwhile, Quinn, who'd already had more lifetimes by the age of sixteen than most of us could even comprehend, was content just sit back and smile, knowing what fools we all were.

They say, "Men plan; God laughs." Well, Quinn laughed, too.

In fact, I can still see her now, kneeling in her underwear on my unmade bed, running a hand through her short blonde hair and laughing darkly.

"It's as simple as this, my dear: you're what I require," she'd say, mocking him.

And then I'd laugh too, not stopping to wonder if she did the same thing in bed with him, about me.

It was just one of the many things I didn't let myself dwell on until after everything had come to an end.

When I was honest with myself, I knew she was still sleeping with Jesse all throughout our affair, and _not _out of some perverse sense of obligation.

But because she _liked_ it.

And I also knew he wasn't the only one.

But there wasn't room for that kind of stark honesty where she and I were concerned, not in conversation, and certainly not in bed. Could I have stomached it, really, if I'd let myself think about him pressing into her in the same place where my fingers were pressing? Could I have tasted her while, at the same time, thinking of her as _tainted goods_?

More than once in our staggered romance, I came across the evidence of strange fingerprints on her body and panicked, my adrenaline spiking as if I'd walked in on an intruder. Only I didn't really belong there either; I never had.

We first met at a party my cousin Tina had thrown for me just after I arrived in the city from Ohio. Tina had been singing in shows for years by then, and she was doing me a great personal and professional favor by trying to introduce me to some of her friends in the business. As the guests began to arrive, though, I found that I was soon hopelessly overwhelmed.

In Ohio, I had sparkled like a jewel, like a star. Here, among people I'd idolized from the moment I'd learned what _Broadway_ was, I was nothing. A dull, ordinary nobody.

It was almost too much to bear.

"Don't you just hate these things?" a voice said, and suddenly she was just _there_ next to me, the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen from so close a vantage point.

There had been pretty girls in Ohio, sure. Girls I'd stared at just a little too long, thought about just a little too much. But _she_ was in an entirely different league. Looking at this unexpected creature beside me made me feel guilty for every time I'd used words like "glamorous" or "exquisite" in the past, because surely nothing and no one was worthy of those words the way this girl was. And the fact that she was a real, live person, living in the same city, standing in the same room, attending the same party that I now was-

I wondered if some of her impossible radiance would rub off on me, if only I could figure out a way to touch her.

"I mean, I guess it's nice that Tina's doing this for her _hick cousin_, or whatever," she continued, pausing to take a sip from her glass. "But the whole thing strikes me as sort of sad."

It would be _hours_ before I'd realize I had just been insulted. I was too transfixed. I just stood there, blinking at her, for what felt like ages.

"I don't know; I think it's kind of nice," I finally said, stupidly.

She sneered in response, and I'd never been so terrified or so turned on in my entire life. I suddenly got the strangest urge to run my tongue across her perfect top row of teeth.

She didn't say much to me after that, and even if she had, I doubt I would have made a great conversationalist, given the uncomfortable state I was in. Later, when all the guests had gone home, Tina smirked at me, saying, "I saw you talking to Princess Grace. What was _that_ like?"

"Who?" I asked.

"You know...the blonde? Looks like a Hitchcock girl?"

I smiled. "I guess we talked a little. Who is she _really_?"

While I expected to learn that she was some marvelous, burgeoning ingénue, I was relieved to discover that Quinn Fabray was instead merely a hanger-on, the showroom girlfriend of the modern era's Rex Harrison, a popular leading man named Jesse St. James.

"You'd do best to steer clear," Tina warned. "They both scare the shit out of me." But she might as well have been singing me a lullaby for all the attention I was paying.

Days later, when the phone rang, I was surprised to hear Quinn's voice on the other end, but at least by then I felt better equipped to deal with her. As I'd come to learn over the next several months, my indignation was much easier to summon when I wasn't preoccupied with the hazards of being in her physical presence.

"I assume you're calling to apologize," I said.

"What?" she huffed. "No. I'm calling to invite you to lunch. Why would I be calling to apologize?"

"For what you said at the party about me being a _hick_," I said, in as haughty a tone as I could manage. "I'm guessing you didn't know I was Tina's cousin when you said that to me."

And then that laugh like warm honey.

"_Of course_ I knew who you were."

That was, without question, the moment I was hooked.

Two days after Sam showed me the photograph of what _might_ have been Beth, I decided to call Santana, who was the only friend of Quinn's I ever knew.

"I don't know where she is, Berry, so don't ask," Santana said right off the bat. "I haven't seen her since she got out of the hospital, and that was _eight_ months ago."

"The hospital? Was she sick?" Quinn had never had so much as a cold in all the time I knew her, but the thought of her as an invalid was, frankly, somewhat _appealing_. I imagined myself rushing to her bedside to nurse her back to health.

"Yeah, she was _sick_ alright," Santana scoffed, interrupting my Florence Nightingale fantasy. "Look, all I know is, St. James dropped her off at the macadamia ranch right after you two split, and she called me to pick her up six months later. I dropped her off at some apartment in Brooklyn, and that's the last I've seen or heard from her."

"Are you saying Jesse had her _committed_?" I asked, outraged.

"Don't be ridiculous, Berry. This isn't some Charles Dickens novel. She checked _herself_ in."


	3. Chapter 3

"Don't be _ridiculous_, Rachel."

By the end of it all, that had probably become one of Quinn's favorite things to say to me because, as it seemed, I was _always_ being ridiculous about _something_ that had happened between us. I never necessarily saw it that way, but I had no choice but to take her word for it. Because whatever suffering I may have felt throughout those years, whatever dirty little indignities my longing for her may heaped on me, it was all happening in a context I wasn't meant to fully comprehend.

Quinn had designed it that way from the start, kept me in the dark on purpose. And so, of course, she knew better than I did if my feelings were warranted at any given moment, because _she_ was the one who knew what was coming next.

In all honesty, as difficult to handle as our guerilla-warfare-style romance was for me, it was probably for the best that she held the reins, or at least, that I believed she did. I'm sure she thought that, if I'd been the one in charge, I'd have somehow whisked her away from him and had us living together in my dingy studio apartment in the blink of an eye. And sure, maybe I'd fantasized about that, about forever.

But sometimes the thought of forever with Quinn felt too much like a nightmare. There was too much I didn't know about her, too much I didn't want to know, too much that didn't fit into my idea of a happily ever after.

So, given the chance to choose, I'm still not sure what choice I'd have made for us back then. As it is, I _still_ haven't quite figured out where to fit Quinn Fabray into the story my life. Will I think about her today? Will I look for her? Will I remember her again? And if I do, how will I remember her this time?

It _should_ have occurred to me that sleeping with the girlfriend of one of the most sought-after actors on Broadway was probably not conducive to getting my own stage career going, but that's honestly not the reason why it took three months for Quinn and I to start sleeping together. The main reason, instead, was that I was _intensely_ intimidated by the idea of doing anything remotely sexual with Quinn Fabray. I'd fooled around with one or two girls back in Ohio, but, as far as I was concerned, a girl as sophisticated as Quinn deserved more than whatever clumsy, fumbling techniques I'd worked out after one too many wine coolers in my dads' basement.

As it turned out, though, there was no reason for me to have been so worried, because by the first time anything happened between us, there wasn't even time for me to touch her.

She just sort of _ambushed_ me in the bathroom at a New Year's Eve party she and Jesse were having at their apartment for a few friends and the people involved in a show Jesse was trying to get off the ground. And the whole thing was over so quickly that I barely had time to even register that it had happened at all before I was stumbling, jelly-legged, back out into the living room just as she and Jesse were sharing a midnight kiss.

But I'd be a liar if I said I hadn't seen it coming at least a little bit. She'd turned up, unannounced, at my place at least half a dozen times between our first meeting and the moment I found myself perched on that bathroom counter with the faucet digging into my back. And always with her came this indefinable electricity, this sense that something incredible was going to happen sooner or later. I'd never felt that way about anything other than singing and acting, about anything outside of _myself_ and my dreams and my talent. So feeling it about another person, feeling it emanating from another person, was a thrill I was quickly finding highly addictive.

I'd feel her hovering closer to me with each visit, daring me to make a move. But I'd always flinch at the last second, so afraid that if I ever _did_ touch her, kiss her, the way I truly wanted to, she'd just laugh at me, and the spell would be broken.

So during those first few weeks, I couldn't understand why she kept coming back. We didn't talk about the theater (it bored her, perhaps understandably so), and she didn't talk about herself. So instead, we'd just wind up watching television or cooking dinner together in a heavy silence, broken every so often by my own nervous ramblings. And every time she left, grinning at me over her left shoulder as she headed down the corridor of my apartment building, I was sure it was the last time I'd ever see her.

In fact, I was _always_ sure, all those years, every time, except for the one that really did turn out to be the last.

Anyway, after our little interlude at New Year's Eve, things started to move much more quickly. Now that his show was in workshop, Jesse didn't need Quinn around as much, didn't need for her to work her charm on investors and directors, or whatever it was he kept her around to do. All I knew was that he was busy working, which meant that her work, at least for the moment, was done.

Her appearances at my doorstep became even more frequent, and from then on, were always accompanied by some rushed, heated tumble. Only rarely would she allow me to reciprocate, and full nudity was never part of the repertoire. But it seemed _romantic_, I guess, to me at first, that her desire for me was so urgent that there wasn't time for trivial things like _undressing_ beforehand.

But finally, towards March, my curiosity got the better of me. She had come over after my shift at the diner and thrust her hand into the waistband of my pants before I could even shut the door behind her. Once we'd made it to the bed, she'd let me touch her, too, but only with her fingers covering my own. She'd barely made a sound until the very end, and then there was nothing but a sharp moan, a long exhale of breath, and that _damn_ laugh, before she rolled out of bed and headed off into the bathroom.

After a few minutes of serious consideration, I padded in after her, and, trying to sound seductive over the roar of the running water, shouted "What would you do if I got in there with you?"

There was a long moment of nothing but the water running and my heart pounding, and then-

"Get out, Rachel."

I raced back into the bedroom and threw myself onto the bed, crying in fear and disbelief. For just over two months, we'd been doing _whatever_ it was we were doing, rutting against each other in my bed on afternoons when she knew Jesse wouldn't be looking for her, or I guess perhaps just when she had nothing better to do.

And now I'd gone and ruined it, or so I thought. Made more of it than what it was. Pushed for too much too soon. I felt unbearably ashamed, and as soon as I heard the water shut off, I scrambled over to the dresser and threw on some old t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants before slumping back into the bed, still sobbing the entire time.

After a while, I felt the bed dip, and then, inexplicably, Quinn's arms were around me. I realized then that she'd never actually held me like that before, and the thought sent me into another crescendo of sobs.

I expected her to think better of the whole thing and just leave, but instead she lifted a hand to brush my hair away from my wet face, and pulled me closer, whispering into my ear.

"Shh," she soothed, and then a little laugh. "You're being a little ridiculous, you know that? You'll tire yourself out with all this crying."

I swallowed hard and nodded my head, as she continued to pet at me with delicate fingers. And then, when I'd finally regained control of myself, she'd pressed her lips to the back of my neck and said, "Sweetheart, there's something I need you to understand. Just because there are certain things you're ready for, that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with them yet, ok?"

I don't know why, but at the time, it felt like she was giving me the world just then. Like she was holding some secret, and not just the secret of her body, on reserve for only me. And that was enough to keep me going at the time, even though after that day she disappeared for over a month.

When I think about it now though, I have no idea what that afternoon was all about.


	4. Chapter 4

In the almost-three years of my life that were consumed by our affair, I never truly got used to Quinn's disappearing habit. But, at least in the beginning, I found other ways to keep myself busy. There was my job at the diner, auditions to go on, and a whole city to explore. And I suppose that, at first anyway, there was something just a bit exciting and romantic about not knowing when I would see her again.

But as time wore on, as the rejections rolled in and the money ran out and the city became less and less inviting, as I came to crave her more and see her less, I got restless. I'd find myself riding the subway out stations past my stop, just to comb the streets of Jesse's neighborhood, hoping to catch sight of her. I felt desperately compelled to know what it was she did, how she looked, who she was when we weren't groping each other in my dimly-lit apartment.

Sometimes I did fantasize about finding her on one of these reconnaissance missions, all stunningly dressed for some big event with Jesse, but looking hopelessly lonely and sad. She'd see me, though, and her face would burst into an open, glowing smile, and she'd break away from him, and run off with me...

I tried not to think about it too much, though. Because the truth was that if she ever knew I was doing that, pushing my was into spheres of her life where I didn't belong, I had very little doubt that she'd retreat from me altogether. And I didn't think I could bear that.

I still don't know if I can.

It was right around the time I realized I would probably never see her face, never hear that laugh, never kiss those lips again, that I started taking the pills to help me sleep at night. It wasn't a one-to-one correlation; there were other, perhaps bigger, reasons why I was having trouble sleeping: all the nervous anxiety of having been cast in my first show, the letter I'd gotten from home saying my dad's heart condition had gotten worse. But it didn't help matters at all that one ear was always trained on the door, listening for her light footsteps in the corridor, that my spine was always tensed as if waiting for her touch.

The pills helped, there's no question about that, but still sometimes visions of Quinn manage to slip through my medicated haze and haunt my dreams. When I see her in my sleep though, she's even more perfect than she ever was in life. Her eyes are never wild and tired, there are no worrisome little half-covered-over needle marks to be found, no traces of anyone else's presence on her skin. And there in my dreams, she loves me with a gentleness I only felt perhaps a handful of times from her in waking life.

And once or twice during a performance, I've looked out into the audience from the wings and thought I've seen her there, but I know it can't be true, especially now that I know she spent half of the last year institutionalized.

I don't know why that news from Santana troubled me so deeply; after all, it wasn't the first time. I learned, far after the fact, that at least twice during her disappearances from me, Quinn had been put on seventy-two-hour psych hold, once precipitated by an overdose of some kind, and the other after an incident with a razor blade.

I'd seen the signs, the scars afterward, but ignored them until, one night in Sam's bar, with her looking happier and healthier than ever, she'd suddenly just blurted it all out to me like it was nothing. I brought her home with me that night, and she'd clung to me like a life raft, the way I'd always thought I'd wanted her to need me.

But instead I just ended up lying awake with a knot coiling tightly in my stomach, wondering if maybe I was the one who was drowning.

Other times, I know, the reasons for her leaving me weren't so bleak, especially when it came time for Jesse's show to make the move from workshop to off-Broadway. Oddly enough, though, those were the times it was even harder for me to sit still, the times when I knew she was with him, all dressed up and smiling at his side, his arm wrapped around her waist.

It killed me that I couldn't be the one to take her out like that in polite society. That I couldn't be the one to show her off at cocktail parties, premieres, gallery openings, and all the other fancy places I knew they went.

But just once during that time, in a fit of half-drunken madness, I actually marched right over to Jesse's place and knocked on their door. I hadn't seen or heard from Quinn in ten days and already I felt myself losing my grip. By the time he answered it, I was shaking like a leaf, but was even more stunned to see that he wasn't doing much better. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled.

"Can I help you?" he said, nervously glancing out past me into the hallway as he spoke.

I thought about running, but I also thought about reaching out to fix the haphazard mis-buttoning of his wrinkled dress shirt.

"I'm looking for Quinn," I said, jamming my trembling hands down into my pockets. "I...I'm a friend of hers...and I haven't seen her in a few days."

He leaned against the doorframe and looked down at his bare feet. "I don't know where she is either," he admitted. "She didn't come home last night."

I expected him to be in a rage, furious with her for not having come home, furious with me for having the audacity to turn up on his doorstep. But instead he just looked anxious and scared, which frightened me all the more.

And it made me stop and wonder, maybe he did really care about her, maybe he actually loved her, just as much as I did, maybe even more.

"If you see her," he said quietly, "please ask her to come home."

I wonder sometimes what would have happened if he and I had gone out for a drink that afternoon and hashed it out, what we could have learned, if we could have saved each other's lives a little instead of wasting our energy trying to save hers.

When I got back home that evening, she was sitting there on my sofa, dressed to the nines and reading a magazine.

"Your landlady let me in," she said with a mischievous smirk. "I told her I was your sister."

Before I could say anything, she was standing, turning to present me with the zipper of her gown like a gift, making me forget all my anger and indignation.

And then I was following her to the bedroom, all my questions long forgotten.


	5. Chapter 5

Sometimes I can't help but wonder what would have happened, if things would have turned out differently at all, if I hadn't behaved so badly in the end. At the time, when she'd offered to get me a part in Jesse's new show, all I could think about what was she'd have to do to make it happen. And I couldn't stomach it. I went green at the thought of her touching someone else under the guise of doing _me_ a favor.

And beyond that, I couldn't imagine what she was playing at, trying suddenly to draw me in to such close proximity to her life with Jesse. What sick thrill was she seeking, I asked, by trying to force me to watch her play show wife night after night?

These days, though, I feel forced to accept at least the possibility that she was trying to give me the only _real _thing she felt she had to give, a last act of kindness before her light flickered out for good.

And I'd thrown it back in her face like an ungrateful child.

It's all the more shameful to me now when I consider the fact that, truth be told, I'd never had anything of comparable value to offer her in return. Quinn was trying, there at the end, to give me the only thing I'd ever truly wanted (aside from her), and I'll I'd ever been able to do for her was shower her with nonsense, little tokens that always meant more to me in giving them than they did to her in receiving.

I'd always felt so proud of myself in the moments leading up to the presentation of the prize, and each time, I'd catch a glimpse of her genuine gratitude before her features would cloud over with indignation.

"What am I supposed to do with this, Rachel?" she'd say, holding whatever silly thing it was I'd given her at a distance as if it were contaminated. "It's not like I can take it home with me."

I was stung, always, by the reminder that her home was elsewhere, in a place where no trace of me or us could risk being discovered. But now I think it was more than that. Now I can see that my darling Quinn had no real home at all, no place where she could keep the things that mattered to her safe.

"I hate that I can never give you anything," I'd said with a sigh. It was three days after Valentine's, and the flowers I'd bought for her were already starting to wilt in the vase on my kitchen counter where she'd insisted I keep them.

I'd expected her to make a joke, perhaps something vulgar, or to get annoyed with me and threaten to leave. But instead she'd lifted my hand to her lips and kissed my palm before pressing it against her chest.

"This is enough, Rachel, really," she'd whispered. "Please believe that."

And, oh, how I'd wanted to. How I'd wanted to believe that in some way, some part of me could be enough to soothe the tempest swirling inside her. By then, it was the only talent I still aspired to, and even so, I wasn't particularly confident that I was up to the task.

The beginning of the end came on a September night as we were slow dancing after closing time at Sam's. I had no way of knowing then that we were dancing toward the brink of our own destruction, too. I only knew that the way she was holding me made me feel wanted in a way I'd given up on ever knowing until that night.

We were each a little tipsy from a night spent holding court in that back booth, the one place on Earth outside of my apartment where she and I existed as an "us." We were pressed close, swaying, my head resting on her shoulder, lips _just_ grazing the side of her neck. Suddenly a little gasp escaped from her throat, and I giggled, nuzzling against the spot from which it had emanated.

"You _never_ sing anymore," she rasped.

It was the last thing in the world I'd been expecting her to say, and it took me a moment to realize that I'd been sort of half-humming, half-singing along to the record Sam had switched on as he was tidying up the bar: _You go to my head, and you linger like a haunting refrain_...

"Sure, I do," I countered absently, not particularly wanting to ruin the evening by going down whatever road she was trying to steer us onto.

But the swaying stopped. I looked up and saw tears beginning to swell in the corners of her eyes. It made my chest constrict in alarm. Everything about that night, up to that very moment, had been perfection. But now, out of the blue, it was all about to go topsy-turvy again, and I wasn't sure I had it in me to stop it from happening.

"You _don't_," she whispered, "and it's all my fault."

I steeled myself, despite the fog of lust and gin that had settled in my brain over the course of the evening, and had Sam get us a cab. On the way, I petted at her hands and arms while she whimpered like some wounded animal, clenching her teeth against a torrent of sobs threatening to break loose.

I didn't understand where this was coming from. Had I really stopped singing? Perhaps it was true. It _had_ been a while since I'd been on an audition. After that first year of rejections, I'd found my heart just wasn't in it anymore. But what difference did it make? I had my job and enough money to stay afloat. _And I had Quinn. _

And it was hard to feel badly about not having crowds of audiences cheering my name once I'd known what it felt like to hear it in Quinn Fabray's sandpapery whisper. Quinn Fabray, who I'd come to crave in all her incarnations: from the smirking debutante who made devious, unscheduled cameo appearances in my bedroom, to the broken little girl with bandaged wrists and bruised thighs who would sometimes tug at my arms and curl into my side.

"Sweetheart," I said, once we were tucked away in my darkened apartment. "Sweetheart, don't be so sad. It's not that important to me anymore."

But that just set off another set of whimpers. Not knowing what else to do, my fingers began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse. It wasn't until I'd finished undressing her that I realized I had never seen Quinn completely naked before that night, every radiant expanse and every grim scar all on display for me at once. It was a heady sight, so much so that I almost lost track of what I was doing, and if it hadn't been for the gin-inspired confidence bubbling in my blood, for the pleading little look in her eyes, for the desperation I felt to know her, understand her, in any way she'd let me, I probably never would have gotten through the rest of that night.

It was the first and only time she'd ever let me take the lead where we were concerned, and hours later, I drifted off to sleep thinking we'd turned some fantastic corner in our evolution as a couple. But when I awoke, she had vanished again, leaving me to wonder how I could have gotten it so wrong.


	6. Chapter 6

For about two months after that, I started seeing Quinn more often than ever, but only in public. Only in places where I couldn't really see her, or touch her, at least not in the way I wanted. And only to talk about Jesse's show and her inexplicable plot to put me in it.

I was like a woman possessed, though. Each time she'd call, I'd spend hours getting ready for her, foolishly thinking that by wearing the right thing, looking the right way, I could get her to drop the subject and just come home with me instead. She'd worked that brand of magic on me countless times, made me cast off all my resolve with the cut of a dress, that breathy little laugh, a pointed look. But for all my persistence, I couldn't seem to put Quinn Fabray under any such spell of my own. It was demoralizing, and just plain _sad_, and after the fourth or fifth failed attempt, I snapped.

"Why do you keep _doing_ this to me?" I suddenly growled at her in a harsh whisper over lunch one afternoon. "I don't want to be in your boyfriend's stupid show. I don't want to sing. I want _you_. But you _obviously_ don't want me anymore, which makes it hard for me to understand why you keep asking me to meet you like this."

I saw her eyes narrow then, and a coldness came over her that made my kneecaps quiver in their sockets. Her fork clattered down onto her plate, and I winced at the sound.

"Maybe I just want you to be happy, Rachel. Maybe I want to see you get the life that you deserve. And maybe, just maybe, you're the one person I can stand to be around even when we're not _fucking_. But I could be wrong about that. _Obviously_."

I didn't move, hardly _breathed_, as she purposefully softened her features, signaled for our waiter, and paid the check. The fact that I knew I couldn't offer to pay only added to the overwhelming sense of shame I felt. I followed her out of the restaurant, eyes to the floor like a scolded child. And when we were back out in the light of day, I only glanced up long enough to see her slip into a cab and vanish.

I have no idea how long I stood out on that sidewalk, my heart twisting in on itself like a worm on a hook, but eventually I made my way to Sam's bar, and eventually, he got me the rest of the way home.

I didn't see Quinn again for almost seven months.

The first few weeks were absolute torture. There was nothing I could do, no way for me to contact her, short of camping out in front of Jesse's apartment. And while I certainly didn't consider myself above such tactics, I just couldn't bring myself to go through with it. In the past, whenever I'd gotten the urge to haunt the streets where Quinn Fabray lived, I had always been so confident that, even if she never would have shown it, she would have been happy to find me there. But now I wasn't so sure.

And then, of course, there was the foggy memory of the time I'd encountered Jesse St. James on his doorstep, how disheveled he'd looked, how haggard. Somewhere at the back of my mind I knew it had been a warning. _This is what Quinn Fabray does to people_. But I just kept telling myself that perhaps if I never saw him again, I could forget about that, forget all my misgivings and focus on making myself _hers_.

In either case, it wasn't worth the risk. So I didn't go looking for her.

By the end of the second month, I felt like I was coming out of my skin. I began to wonder if this was what Quinn felt like in her sober stretches. The biting, gnawing pain of having to act against every impulse in my mind. The raw ache of a craving that I could do nothing to sate. The scars I'd once been so afraid of were beginning to seem so much more well-reasoned.

A few drinks could usually dull the fire in my veins, but one too many and I'd dissolve into a sobbing mess. It was a delicate balance, and as the days without her stretched out before me with no end in sight, I was certain I was doomed to fall.

Sometimes I'd stay up late reciting her last words to me in my head over and over again, but I never could make any real sense of it. I told myself she just didn't want me anymore and didn't know how else to say so. But just like that, the memories of our last night together would come flooding back and I'd convince myself of just the opposite.

She'd been so broken that night, devastated by something I couldn't understand. I'd seen her that way before, certainly. And there were times I'd seen evidence of worse. But that night, instead of charging at me all quips and barbs or burrowing wordlessly into my side, she'd actually just put herself in my hands. She hadn't pinned me from above, or clung to me from below. She'd trusted me to know what to do.

Maybe I'd gotten it all wrong.

_Steer clear_, Tina had warned me. _She scares the shit out of me_, she'd said. But I hadn't listened to a word of it. I'd wanted to be terrified, to be consumed, and now I was paying the price.

Even so, it was Tina who came to my rescue in the end. Moved me into her apartment, enrolled me in dance classes, found me a vocal coach, and eventually helped me get a job in the chorus of an off-off show. I hated it at first. It felt like every minute I spent in the dance studio, at the theatre, was a betrayal of my life with Quinn, of the promise I'd made (if only to myself) to fight for her at any cost.

I still dreamed of her every night, still looked for her around every corner, was still haunted by the sounds of rough whispers and soft laughter.

Until one day I wasn't.


	7. Chapter 7

It was an odd sense of panic that set in, the first time I realized it had been days since I'd thought about Quinn. It was like getting on the subway and having it suddenly dawn on you that you couldn't remember whether you'd turned off the coffee pot before you left.

There was nothing I could do about it except hope that I wouldn't come back to find my whole life in charred ruins.

There was nothing I could do about Quinn.

Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she didn't want me to know. And so I tried to let myself off the hook for forgetting, from time to time, what the pads of her fingertips felt like, or how the slopes of her shoulders glowed in the sunlight. Remembering couldn't save her, and it wouldn't save me. And at long last, I was ready to be saved.

It wasn't even really the applause that did it. I had the smallest of parts, in a small show, in an even smaller theater, so there wasn't that much of it, to tell you the truth. What really saved me was the work of doing it, the sense that _this_ was something I could devote myself to that would never betray me, never elude me, as long as I stayed true to it. I felt stronger, more confident, with every passing day, and once in a while, I would even catch little glimpses of the girl I'd been back in Ohio, brash and happy, with an uncontainable laugh.

I was laughing like that the afternoon that I stepped out of the stage door to find her standing there.

_Quinn_.

The laughter died in my throat, and yet, somehow, it wasn't all that surprising. She was just suddenly _there_, and for some reason, it made sense to me. It was almost as though I'd been waiting for her – not for seven months, but for something more like fifteen minutes. Like she'd gone down to the corner to pick us up some ice cream and come back to meet me. And now here she was.

What did surprise me, though, was how thin she looked, how tired. It was summer, and yet she was swallowed up in an oversized sweater, her hair haphazardly pulled back. She was wearing hardly any makeup, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

I'd imagined (when I'd let myself imagine) that with the success of Jesse's show, she'd been strutting around Manhattan like a queen. But instead she looked like an exhausted teenager. It made me wonder, actually, if this is what she'd looked like when she first arrived in New York, fresh off the bus from wherever she'd come from.

"Walk with me?" she asked, taking my arm and steering me out of the alleyway. It didn't matter that she hadn't given me time to answer; there was no question, I'd have gone with her anywhere. It wasn't long, though, before I realized we were turning the corner onto 44th, and I could see the dark blue awning of the Algonquin Hotel. I'd never stayed there before, never even set foot in the lobby, but Quinn had talked about it often.

"Just being on the same block as the place makes me feel like Dorothy Parker," she'd said on numerous occasions, more often than not gesturing grandly with a half-empty cocktail glass in hand.

Out on the street, she squeezed my arm a little tighter, and I realized we had never spent time together in this part of the city before. It was too bright, too public. It made me wonder if I was dreaming, or worse, if I'd finally been woken up.

"I've been staying here for a few days while I take care of some things," she said. "Will you come up?"

There were a million questions I should have asked. Immediate questions, like, "What kinds of things?" and "Where's the money coming from?" and "What about Jesse?" But none of those things even occurred to me until much later. And then there were the bigger things, the things I was desperate to know but couldn't even begin to fathom asking: "Why did you leave me?" "Where have you been?" "What made you decide to come back now?"

Instead, I just nodded dumbly and let her pull me through the lobby, up the elevator, and down a narrow corridor into a small, dimly-lit room with a single bed. It was the closest I'd ever come to being in a space that _belonged_ to Quinn, and I wanted to commit every little detail to memory, wanted to know how she made her bed, hung her clothes, laid out all her things on the bathroom counter. Of course, because it was a hotel room, the details were all a bit sparse and impersonal. But I remember that the wallpaper had little bunches of flowers on it, and there was a small, haphazardly-unpacked suitcase pushed up against the wall under the window. She had one nice dress, hung on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. I spotted the playbill from my show on the side table next to the bed.

"You came to my show?" I asked, confused.

"Of course, I did," she laughed, as if it were all so simple. Like we weren't standing separated by seven months of absence and an even longer history of doubts and unanswered questions.

I was desperate to kiss her then, and so I did, and I was surprised when she didn't push me away. It was gentle and sweet and _familiar_, and I vaguely registered a trembling in her fingers when she reached up to tuck my hair behind my ear. I pulled her closer to me, and she broke the kiss to rest her head on my shoulder, letting out a deep sigh.

"I was hoping you would stay with me tonight," she said. "But this is the last time, Rachel."

I don't know why I didn't believe her. If she'd said it to me any other time, I probably would have burst into tears and blurted about a million refusals. But that afternoon, all of the sternness had gone out of her voice; it sounded to me like a surrender.

"Of course, I'll stay with you."

She ordered us a small dinner from room service, and we ate side-by-side on the bed while she asked me a million questions about my role in the show and what my plans were when the run was over.

"You sing better than the lead. And you're prettier, too," she said casually, between mouthfuls. I'd never seen her eat so heartily; it was endearing. "You'll get a bigger role next time, in a better show."

Though I lacked her confidence in my prospects, I didn't argue, just leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, giggling.

After the food had been cleared away, she turned to me with a serious look.

"Will you be terribly disappointed if we don't-?" the question trailed off as a rare blush appeared on her face.

"Of course not," I said, eager to ease her obvious nerves.

"I'd like to...be close to you...tonight. But I don't think I can-"

"Sweetheart, it's fine," I interjected, taking her hands in mine and kissing them. I honestly didn't care what she wanted to do that night, as long as she stayed near to me. But I was troubled by how frail she suddenly seemed, how timid. "Why don't you go into the bathroom and wash up?" I suggested.

She nodded and got up from the bed, went into the bathroom, and shut the door behind her. I heard the water running and was struck by an urge to go through her things for clues. I could tell that she'd been horribly shaken by something in the months we'd spent apart, and though I couldn't bring myself to ask her, I was desperate to find out what it was. Maybe some artifact in that room held the key to explaining what had taken all of the fight out of my Quinn, but I'll never know it.

I couldn't bring myself to go picking through her things like some detective, not when she'd come back to me so exposed already.

The bathroom door reopened, and she padded out in just her underthings, her hair down around her shoulders and slightly damp. I could see how truly bone thin she'd gotten, and there was a thick scar on her left side, just below her ribcage, that I'd never seen before. It was a lot to take in, but I smiled at her gently, before heading into the bathroom myself. When I came back out, she was already under the sheets, and I laughed a little as I slid in beside her.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Nothing. I just feel like a teenager," I said sheepishly. "Like we're having a sleepover or something."

"Did you have a lot of sleepovers with girls in their underwear when you were a teenager?" she quipped, pulling me into her arms. Her skin was soft, softer than I had remembered, and I melted against it, resting my head on her chest.

"No, actually," I admitted. "I don't think I ever really had a sleepover of any kind."

She started to comb through my hair with her fingers. "I wish I'd met you when I was sixteen," she confessed with a kiss into the crown of my head.

"I bet I would have been crazy about you in high school," I replied, grinning at the thought of a disaffected, teenaged Quinn prowling the halls of my boring Midwestern high school, mysterious and untouchable like the first time I'd seen her at Tina's party.

"No," she said, the movement of her fingers suddenly stilling.

"No?"

"You would have been _kind_ to me, even though you should have hated me. And maybe that would have been enough to help me want to do things differently."

I didn't know exactly what she meant, only that I could feel her tears as they began to slide down off of her cheeks. I pushed myself up and started to kiss them away a softly as I could, wanting her to feel how much I cared for her without pressing her for more.

"Sing for me?" she asked, and so I did. Song after song, all those bluesy little numbers we used to listen to back at Sam's. When I'd forget the words, she'd kiss my forehead as I hummed along. It was hours before either of us fell asleep, if either of us really slept that night at all. We mostly just passed the time pressed against each other in different configurations, kissing tears, kissing scars, humming nonsensical confessions into each other's skin. It all felt like some amazing, baffling dream.

And though I truly didn't want it to end, when the morning came, I didn't beg to stay, as I might have done months before.

No, the end for us, as it turned out, was all rather civilized. Pedestrian even. The pulling on of yesterday's clothes, and a quiet mid-morning walk back to the theater, where I had a vocal rehearsal I had to prepare for. She kissed me just outside the stage door, then headed back down the alley, flashing me one last smile before she turned out into the sun.

I didn't cry until after the final curtain of the show that night.

By the time Sam had snapped the photograph in the park of the girl who only _might _have been Beth, it had been a year plus two months since I'd last seen that smile. But this second prolonged, and I suppose, permanent, absence was somehow much easier to take.

Eventually, I came to understand that that night at The Algonquin hadn't been the start of something new for us, but instead a moment Quinn had robbed from time to lay to rest something old. And even if we ever saw each other again, I knew it wouldn't be the same with us, _couldn't_ be, after that.

But that didn't stop me from wondering, imagining, where she might be, what she might be doing. Hoping that one day I would sing for her again.


End file.
